


All of What?

by sophiagratia



Category: Good Wife (TV)
Genre: Abusive Relationship, Female Friendship, Feminist Themes, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-08
Updated: 2012-10-08
Packaged: 2017-11-15 22:33:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/532512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sophiagratia/pseuds/sophiagratia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Diane gives herself a lesson in scale.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All of What?

**Author's Note:**

> Set immediately following 4x02, 'And the Law Won,' with spoilers up to and including that episode. References, but does not explicitly depict, physical partner-abuse.
> 
> The title refers to Anne-Marie Slaughter's article in _The Atlantic_ , '[Why Women Still Can't Have It All](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/07/why-women-still-cant-have-it-all/309020/)' and the surrounding controversy.
> 
> Thanks to [Kathryne](http://archiveofourown.org/users/kathryne/pseuds/kathryne) for a heroic beta.

Diane Lockhart’s guilty fantasy is that she’s the solution to the feminist problem of professional women. In dark moments – and she has nothing but dark moments, lately – she seeks comfort in the image she has of herself on the cover of _The Atlantic_ , poised and gorgeously intimidating behind her desk. She pictures her smirk, the wryly knowing cast of her eyebrows. And she imagines, in the five-thousand-word feature, the deftly elegant prose that puts paid at last to a century of stupid debate. Single-handedly, she’ll erase the false dilemma of ‘having it all’ for good.

She rolls her eyes as she shrugs into her coat and swipes her briefcase from her desk, and she’s not quite sure whether her exasperation is for Maddie Hayward’s wishy-washy refusal to stake a claim, for her own coward self’s mercenary praise for Maddie’s empty speech, or – and it must be this or it wouldn’t be so hard to admit – for the bitter taste of spite and jealousy that came to her unbidden as Alicia left her office. 

She steps out into the cold, and with the bracing wind comes the memory of another cold evening forty years gone. A smoke-filled room, walls slogan-plastered, incongruous against the neo-gothic vaulting, a room full of shouting women, young, inebriated, full of passion. And Anabelle Stevens – and how long has it been since Diane thought of Anabelle – Anabelle Stevens standing up, joint in hand, and shouting down the other voices. ‘Our anger with each other is a weapon used against us,’ Anabelle shouted that day forty years ago, holding the room by force of will, casting shadows of her future politician self. And Diane, twenty and half-stoned, vowed she’d never once forget it. 

She scrubs her gloved hands across her cheeks. _The Atlantic_ , how dare she. How many times will she ask Alicia Florrick to prove her loyalty before she has to confront the simple fact of her own stupid hypocritical paranoia? 

Halfway home to Lakeshore Drive, she turns on her heel and heads for the bar. She’ll rescue this day yet. 

She smiles her usual order at Dave behind the bar, and takes the young associates’ greetings graciously. She’s kinder to the women. She literally back-pats one of them, and laughs at her wide eyes. (Marianne? Marion? Marie? She’ll look it up.) She casts her gaze across the crowd, feeling suddenly expansive.

At the back of the room, the familiar line of a leather collar frames the familiar pile of Kalinda’s updo. Diane lays a careless twenty on the bar and flashes a careless eyebrow at Dave’s goofy grin when he sees his tip. Another of her guilty fantasies is that she has the resources for such careless generosity. In dark moments, she can’t even feel too guilty about it. She balances her wineglass on her fingertips and winds her way through the crowd, guiltlessly enjoying the sway of her hips, the effortless gestures of her shoulders. 

‘May I?’ she asks as though she knows the answer, and Kalinda startles. Her beer sloshes, a little, over the rim of her glass. She looks up at Diane, eyes tight. She hesitates, then nods, shaking the splash from her hands. Diane sits, but something in Kalinda’s manner punctures the wild swell of her gracious mood. 

She clears her throat. Kalinda sips her beer, gives a weak half-smile. 

‘Weird day,’ Diane says. 

‘Yeah,’ Kalinda says. Diane watches her eyes: a flash, a glance at the ceiling, a squint. Kalinda thinks her expression more controlled than it is. It’s a thing they share. 

Diane takes up her wine – and stalls, her glass halfway to her lips. Kalinda’s sleeve, hitched back by her posture, reveals a bruise, dark and wide, the ghost of a grip on her wrist. Diane sips her wine and sets it down. She watches Kalinda watching her notice. Kalinda’s lips grow thin; Kalinda’s knuckles whiten around her glass; but otherwise, Kalinda doesn’t move. Or speak.

To another woman, Diane would say, ‘If you ever want to talk…’. To another woman still, she might say, ‘How do I take out the bastard?’. To a very particular kind of woman, she might say, fingering her own wrist, ‘You’ll be okay. I know. Not soon, but you’ll be okay.’, and wait.

To Kalinda, Diane says nothing. She has to literally bite her cheek to do it, but she says nothing. 

But, too, she must do something to rescue this day. She tries not to laugh at her former expansive mood, at her own superhero delusions. She doesn’t look at Kalinda’s wrist and she doesn’t open her mouth. But it’s urgent, suddenly. Suddenly the fate of the world rests here. Fuck Maddie Hayward, she thinks, fuck Alicia Florrick, fuck feminist sisterhood, fuck _The Atlantic_ , and fuck Anabelle Stevens and the Bryn Mawr Womanists. She must do something here and now. She must make some gesture of immediate repair.

At that moment, fucking Alicia Florrick breezes through the door and catches her eye, and then Diane knows what to do.

She takes a careful sip of her wine. She sets her glass aside. She reaches across the table, and with both hands, gently and slowly, as kindly as she can, folds Kalinda’s sleeve down over her wrist. (She sees her mother’s hands in her own, her mother’s veined, patrician, so-kind hands.) She lays her hands over Kalinda’s. She puts all the energy at her disposal toward keeping her silence. With effort, she meets Kalinda’s eyes. She watches Kalinda struggle to control her breath and her expression. Diane cradles Kalinda’s hands in hers, just for a moment. And it’s too, too helplessly small, too absurd – but this is the gesture of repair she has at her disposal, and so she cradles Kalinda’s hands in her veined, patrician ones, and hopes they are as kind as once her mother’s were. Kalinda’s lips are thin; Kalinda holds her gaze and doesn’t blink. But Diane feels the tension of her grip loosen, just a little, watches Kalinda’s expression soften, just a little, in this absurd small moment that it takes to cover Kalinda’s hands with her own.

Then Diane sits back, and she takes her wine glass in both hands, elbows braced against the table, and is proud to see the liquid surface not so much as tremble. 

She looks up, and she smiles at Alicia, waiting at the bar. Kalinda turns, just betraying panic. She turns back to Diane; her wide eyes narrow; she gives another weak half smile, and nods. Diane nods back, and in her silence tries to convey all that she would say, to all those other women.

She composes a grin and a gesture for Alicia, the performance pitched to that graciousness she can no longer bring herself to feel.

‘Alicia! Join us!’ she calls. 

Kalinda laughs and shakes her head and takes a long, deep drink. 

The day’s not rescued, not remotely, Diane thinks as she shoves down the unwanted bitter thing she feels as Alicia takes a seat between her and Kalinda. But she’s done one thing today she’s proud of, and that’s not nothing. 

One small gesture of repair. Here, the three of them together, is another. Another still, in time, she must extend to Alicia. One by one.

‘Weird day,’ Alicia says, and Diane and Kalinda raise their glasses. It’s not what you have, Diane suddenly thinks – it's this; it's here. It’s the weird, small, compromised moment in which you take what little you have and begin to build something new, something fragile, something that, in time, will grow. 

‘To more weird days to come,’ Diane replies. Their glasses chime; they share a wry, exhausted, short-lived laugh. 

It’s what you build, she tells herself again. She sips her wine, brushes back her hair, and gathering her courage, turns to Alicia. ‘Good work today,’ she says. It’s not enough, but it’s a start. It’s what she has; it's the thing she will begin to build.

*


End file.
